A former motorway patrol officer contacted Smart Motorways Kill to discuss his experiences and voice his opposition to the removal of the hard shoulder.

He has requested anonymity and we will call him Bob. Smart Motorways Kill welcome his input and invite other former or current Highways England staff to contact us with their experiences. Any details supplied will be treated in the strictest confidence, unless stated otherwise.

 Bob was employed by the Highways Agency (forerunner to Highways England) as a road traffic officer (HATO) for seven years until 2013. He undertook his six-week training at Quinton in the West Midlands, and at the disused RAF Pershore (aka Throckmorton airfield) where the redundant airway was used to replicate motorway conditions.

 “On completing my training, I was posed to Knutsford and did a year there on patrol covering the M6 from Stoke on Trent up to Warrington and the M56 from Lymm to the border with North Wales—very busy motorways with a distance of about 32 miles in total.

 At the time there were no smart motorways and the hard shoulder was in operation throughout, except a couple of very short sections in a few areas, but nothing compared to the distance today. Then the M6 had a hard shoulder, which has now changed as it’s a smart motorway. It’s still in place on the M56, except a short section near Runcorn and Junction 7 where it is was opened up to four lanes in both directions and the hard shoulder is removed for about two miles in both directions.

In around 2011 to 2012 I was at Rob Lane in Newton-le-Willows. Graham Doulton, then Chief Executive of the Highways Agency, came to the Highways England North West Regional Control Centre to talk to road traffic officers about the proposals for smart motorways. He showed us diagrams of what they would look like, the signage they would use and details of the emergency refuge areas (ERA).

 We all said it was a really bad idea. We told him that you can put up all the signs you want, vary speeds, etc but there will always be people who are in a rush, ignore the signs or breakdown. We told him in no uncertain terms that people would be killed. He said that our feedback had been noted and that was the last we heard for six months when it was announced smart motorways would be rolled out in the West Midlands area.

 They’ve made a huge investment in smart motorways. They needed to do something about congestion and you can see a difference in traffic movement when you are in a smart motorway area to those are aren’t. But you were constantly hearing about people having accidents and breaking down between ERA’s. So, you’re moving more freely but at what price?

 Even so, when they were first introduced it was very procedure driven. During a normal working day, the motorway would run as three lanes and a hard shoulder. Once traffic reached a certain volume, the hard shoulder would be opened up. But the approach to this was quite intensive. The control room would despatch a patrol and CCTV were checked to ensure the section was clear; the speed limit was dropped to 50mph and then the hard shoulder could be opened up for a time.

 If you think that at the NWRCC we operated four patrols maximum (usually three) to cover the M6 up to the border with Preston, the M60 and the M58. On the M62 at the Croft interchange, there’s a section opened as All Lanes Running (ALR). It was originally two lanes and opened to three with no hard shoulder. The M62 and the M6 have four big junctions: north and south to the M62, and west and east. This particular section is on an overbridge of the M62, above the M6 towards Manchester.

 If we had an accident or breakdown in this section, it would really require five patrols to make it safe. We didn’t even have four, let alone five even then. You would need one patrol at the scene, the second to close the M82 northbound, the third to close the M62 southbound, a fourth to stop the traffic and ideally a fifth to go to the front of the stranded vehicle to drag it off. On a good day, we would have three patrols, making six officers in total.

 Further down the M62 towards Manchester is now being converted to a smart motorway. A section goes on to the M60 towards Bolton and Leeds where there is no hard shoulder. There were numerous live land incidents that I know of, and cones and signs hit by trucks. One of our patrol cars was hit by a truck and the road traffic officer was hospitalised.

 You think of what we have to deal with. There are threatened and actual suicides. For example, I could be on patrol in Preston and get a call about a threatened suicide at Junction 1 at Stockport. That’s a good 45-minute drive to get back and close the motorway to make it safe. That’s if the police are still talking to the person. If they’ve jumped, it’s another story. I’ve dealt with numerous fatal accidents and suicides.

 HE vehicles are all fitted with emergency equipment including flashing front and rear lights and a bullhorn but there is no official training on using it. HE road traffic officers have no law enforcement or policing powers. People don’t realise that police themselves can only deal with incidents on the motorways if they are fast road qualified and have emergency traffic management. Otherwise, they are not trained for that environment.

 HE patrols must observe the speed limit and the instruction is that if they use the equipment on the way to a scene, it’s only an ‘invitation’ for people to move out the way. Without a hard shoulder its extremely difficult to get through. Sometimes, the co-pilot would have to get out and start directing the traffic by hand.

 Once they’re at the scene, they have sufficient equipment to close the motorway. Ideally traffic would be flowing, so you can put a rolling roadblock on to bring traffic to a controlled stop. You would put out cones every 100 metres, place a taper across from the central reservation to the slip road and put the signage and lights on. Then you’d speak to the first couple of drivers to tell them what was happening and where to go, so others can follow them, and you would need to close the slip road.

 When you have standing traffic, it’s much more difficult. In the past, you could turn around trapped traffic on the hard shoulder to drive in the opposite direction. You can put in a contra-flow on the opposite carriageway, by opening the central reservation but that is barely used.

 When I first went on the motorway, the area contractors were equipped with a flatbed crash vehicle specially kitted out with an impact protection device and the driving seats fitted with harnesses. This crash vehicle would go up behind an accident, drop the crash cushion down with a massive Matrix sign with an arrow. They were designed so that they could be hit by a 40-tonne truck at 60mph and the driver could walk away unharmed. So, you felt confident when they were around.

 But they did away with that and went to a transit flatbed with no impact protection cushion and a smaller matrix sign.

 On the original design for smart motorways, when you entered the ERA, it had pressures sensors to detect when a car drove in. That set off an alarm in the control room so that the CCTV automatically turned to point at the car. The telephone box in the ERA would automatically ring the control room and a light would start flashing. But smart motorways mark 2 don’t have them. The Chief of South Yorkshire Police was rightly vociferous against smart motorways to the point where HE changed their minds on the ERAs but then said there wouldn’t be as many and they would not be as close together.

 Everything was about money saving. Around the time the HA moved to smart motorways, they also introduced ‘voluntary’ single crewing. When they were first introduced, they only dealt with incidents on the hard shoulder. Now they have to deal with live lanes. So, they’ve doubled the work and the dangers.

 A lot of people like myself were very unhappy. We felt the changes weren’t safe. In fact, they were dangerous. Several of us started to look for other jobs. I had a young family at the time and I wanted to go home to them at the end of the day. I’d had a few close calls. I nearly had my head took off by an abnormal load. A friend of mine was in the first Highways vehicle struck and killed and in another incident, when a patrol car was protecting a broken down vehicle on the M56 a drunk HGV driver hit it, leaving the two officers seriously injured with a broken neck and a broken back. Two traffic officers were killed in Cumbria.

 These were incidents that happened on the hard shoulder. Its more dangerous without it. The general consensus is that HE didn’t care about safety. They went through the motions of making the right noises. So, you’d have crews that worked nights being made to wear waterproof over-trousers which have two stripes down the side. They claimed it would make them safe, but they weren’t at all. As if two little pin pricks of light could save you when you’ve got HGV’s coming at you.

 Smart motorways should be done away with immediately. The hard shoulder should be brought back. Motorways have to be made safe for the public. Everyone rushes these days, people have places they need to be, which adds to the risk. By removing the safety element (the hard shoulder) you are no longer catering for the fact the people make mistakes, have accidents and breakdowns. You’ve removed the safety feature for those situations.